


will your system be all right

by mythaster



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Misophonia, Self-Harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-07
Updated: 2020-02-07
Packaged: 2021-02-27 22:34:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,352
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22593367
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mythaster/pseuds/mythaster
Summary: Michael has misophonia. It's not a big deal except that he feels like he's going crazy.
Comments: 7
Kudos: 87





	will your system be all right

**Author's Note:**

> Utterly, blatantly self-projecting onto this poor man who's already been through enough, just because I'm straight up not having a good time this Thursday evening.

He’s always felt a little... crazy.

Maybe ‘crazy’ is the wrong word, with the wrong pejorative, reductive connotations. He wouldn’t like to diminish the other people’s real problems, real issues, real struggles. What he has is nothing, he’s certain. It’s so much nothing, in fact, that he doesn’t tell anyone.

(He doesn’t have many people to tell. He cringes to think of what Ms. Robinson would say to his unburdening himself on her.)

It’s called misophonia, according to the internet. He thinks a psychiatrist or a therapist would agree, not that he's ever gone. He doesn't have to.

Unfortunately, naming the thing does absolutely nothing to help. It might have made it worse.

+

The thing is, though, it really is maddening. It’s one of the exact reasons he doesn’t have anyone to tell.

In a job where Fear is a capitalized, proper noun, and all too frequently comes in the plural, too, Michael has no idea how to categorize this foolish, awful paranoia that lives in his ears. There have been late nights when he has stayed in the Institute even later than Ms. Robinson, trying to pin it on one Entity or another. The idea that it could be tamed by Smirke’s categories, rather than a well-intentioned but threadbare official medical site, is a thin hope, but he takes it. To no real avail.

(Sometimes it feels like a mean, tiny manifestation of the Slaughter. The violence he does to his wrists and hands and, more roundaboutly, to his ears with headphones turned up on the hardest music he can bear - Nightwish, occasionally Breaking Benjamin, stuff that Eric has, on occasion, laughed to see in his phone’s music library - feels... not quite his own. But it doesn’t go to the root of it: the awful, sinking, cringing horror at the sounds which, for no real reason, turn him senseless with fear.)

He doesn’t go out much. He isn’t that kind of person, anyway, but he's cut short too many nights out to keep trying. Restaurants, cafes, coffee shops are out of the picture, eternally, unless he is alone and has his headphones with him. Movies are difficult; sometimes he manages, if he sees something unpopular and long after its release date and the theatre is empty. Public transport is its own constant trigger.

Insane. It is absolutely insane, and Michael has no illusions about that. They’re just sounds. They’re just sounds.

They are just

+

sounds, he thinks to himself, hands pressed over his mouth as he huddles in a unisex bathroom stall. They’re just sounds! They can’t hurt you! Stupid, stupid, stupid, hateful, hateful, stupid--

+

He is a nice person. He has tried all his life to be a good, kind, helpful, nice person. It’s a fear of its own, sometimes, but the alternative is worse. He tries to be nice.

The little madness makes it so hard sometimes.

A woman ahead of him in line at the grocery store sniffles, and he shivers. She does it again and he imagines screaming, lashing out, even stomping his foot like a child. She does it again and he leaves the shop without his items, unable to bear the imagining, the shaking of his hands, how it feels to be so completely out of control in his own senses, his own body, his own mind.

+

The Stranger, he thinks, paging through a small stack of statements. Hunting, in his own way. It is three in the morning on a Wednesday night - no, a Thursday morning - and he has no intention of calling in sick tomorrow, but this time of night - this dark, chilly, damp, silent small-hours time - is one of the only kinds of peace he knows. He’s not exhausted enough to give it up yet.

It’s not the Stranger. The Stranger’s motives are different, the things it wants are different. Michael sets the statements aside and cups a mug of strong tea in both hands. Even _thinking_ about this thing, living in his head, makes his hands shake.

+

He spends the third lunch break that week in the bathroom stall, rocking, running both hands through his hair over and over until the urge to scream has passed.

+

Michael and Eric are working on statements together, and Eric has come to work with a bit of a cold. Sitting there, trying to take notes, trying to brave the real, existential horrors of their shared job, while the little madness shrieks and tears around and makes Michael imagine awful things, is, perhaps, one of the hardest things Michael has ever done.

His foot is jiggling underneath the table, safely out of sight. Michael wonders if he could stop it; he tries, and it only jiggles harder, desperate. He is taking notes in a nearly-full notebook, which is the only reason he’s not scratching slow-forming, blood-freckled stripes onto his wrist with the pen cap. He would very much like to; hurting himself is always a better option than lashing out at someone else. Especially Eric.

He is very, very close, though. His skin feels feverish, and he restricts his speech to mm-hmms and umms and nonverbal head-shakes. There’s something in his throat trying to climb out.

Ms. Robinson passes through, on her way to throw more statements around like confetti, probably, so Michael can try to pick them up later. As usual. He glances up at her as she goes - just quickly, an instinct, a natural reaction - but she must... notice. She must see it on his face. She pauses by the table.

Then, in the middle of Eric’s one-sided discussion about some potential ritual, she does something she’s never done before: she touches Michael’s shoulder.

“Go home,” she says crisply.

Michael shoots to his feet like his body had only been waiting for permission. His knee hits the table and he knows there will be a bruise, but it’s the least of his pains. He says a shaky apology to Eric, without looking at either of them, and almost runs from the room.

+

Relief is always mingled with guilt and disgust and self-hatred. He stares at his still-shaking hands the rest of the evening, hating them. It’s almost worse when his taxed nerves finally, finally calm, and he’s left in the mockery of a normal, functioning, sane human body.

+

It is four in the morning on a Friday evening, and Michael looks down at the three statements on the table before him. It’s utterly silent in the Archives, but he still has headphones in, playing a single song on repeat. It’s been going since two AM and he has both memorized the lyrics and music flawlessly as well as forgotten what song it is and by what band.

Unreal sensations. Your own senses lying to you. Dishonest brains, faulty bodies. Jurgen Leitner refers to it as Es Mentiras, which Michael thinks is an unfairly lovely name for this thing that he hates very, very much.

He shoves the statements away and leans back in the uncomfortable wooden chair, sliding down, down, down, until his head rests against the back of the chair, and he is staring at the dark ceiling. His hands begin to tremble.

+

Some nights, he wonders if he really does have it living in his head. Sometimes, he wonders if Ms. Robinson saw it there, when she told him to go home. He wonders if she mentioned it to Eric. Eric hasn’t behaved differently towards him, so he hopes not. He already knows he’s the weakest of their little team. For Eric to think him even weaker would be humiliating.

Then again, something is inescapably, intrinsically wrong with him. It doesn’t matter if it’s a Fear or just a fear. The small, cruel madness is there, and there is - according to the internet, according to Smirke, according to the psychiatrists, according to the statements - no taking it out. There is no escaping it.

+

In a funny way, he’s relieved when Ms. Robinson brings up Zemlya Sannikova.

“Face your fears, right?” he says, and laughs, and it’s almost satisfying, in a small, mean way, to see surprise in Gertrude’s eyes.


End file.
